Historically, the speed of a wired connection at the access edge has always been faster than that of a wireless connection. This means workers had to choose between the performance of wired connectivity and the convenience of a wireless connection. Consequently, workers often had to modify the way they worked— first, finding a wired port to use for high-bandwidth applications, such as video or streaming media, and then shifting to wireless connections when the need to be mobile was more important than having the performance of wired.

Today, though, the industry sits on the precipice of the biggest innovation in the history of wireless LAN: the release of 802.11ac Wave 2. Wave 1 of 802.11ac brought network speeds that were 1.3 Gbps (Gigabits per second), which is on par with wired networking speeds. However, 802.11ac Wave 2 shatters the gigabit barrier with speeds of up to 6.8 Gbps.